The Tollund Man by Seamus Heaney

Introduction

I

The Tollund Man lived during the late 5th century BC and/or early 4th century BC, during the period characterised in Scandinavia as the Pre-Roman Iron Age. He was buried in a peat bog on the Jutland Peninsula in Denmark. Such a find is known as a bog body. He is remarkable for the fact that his body was so well preserved that he seemed to have died only recently.

On 6 May, 1950, the Højgård brothers from the small village of Tollund were cutting peat for their tile stove and kitchen range in the Bjældskovdal peat bog, 10 km west of Silkeborg, Denmark. As the two brothers worked, they suddenly saw in the peat layer a face so fresh that they could only suppose that they had stumbled on a recent murder. They immediately notified the police at Silkeborg.

The Tollund Man lay 50 metres away from firm ground, his body arranged in a foetal position, and had been buried under about two metres of peat. He wore a pointed skin cap on his head fastened securely under his chin by a hide thong. There was a smooth hide belt around his waist. Otherwise, he was naked. His hair was cropped so short as to be almost entirely hidden by his cap. He was almost clean-shaven, but there was very short stubble on his chin and upper lip, suggesting that he had not shaved on the day of his death. There was a rope made of two leather thongs twisted together under a small lump of peat beside his head. It was drawn tight around his neck and throat and then coiled like a snake over his shoulder and down his back.

Underneath the body was a thin layer of moss. Scientists know that this moss was formed in Danish peat bogs in the early Iron Age, therefore, the body was suspected to have been placed in the bog approximately 2,000 years ago during the early Iron Age. Subsequent C14 radiocarbon dating of Tollund Man’s hair indicated that he died in approximately 350 BC. The acid in the peat, along with the lack of oxygen underneath the surface, had preserved the soft tissues of his body.

Examinations and X-rays showed that the man’s head was undamaged, and his heart, lungs and liver were well preserved. He was not an old man, though he must have been over 20 years old because his wisdom teeth had grown in. The Silkeborg Museum estimates his age as 40 and height at 161 cm, comparatively short-statured even for his time. It is likely, however, that the body has shrunk in the bog.

He was probably hanged using the rope around his neck. The noose left clear marks on the skin under his chin and at the side of his neck but there was no mark at the back of the neck where the knot was found. Due to skeletal decomposition, it is impossible to tell if the neck had been broken.

The stomach and intestines were examined and tests carried out on their contents. The scientists discovered that the man’s last meal had been a kind of soup made from vegetables and seeds, some cultivated seeds and some wild: barley, linseed, ‘gold of pleasure’, knotweed, bristlegrass, and camomile.

There were no traces of meat in the man’s digestive system, and from the stage of digestion it was obvious that the man had lived for 12 to 24 hours after this last meal. In other words, he had not eaten for a day before his death. Although similar vegetable soups were not unusual for people of this time, two interesting things were noted:

1. The soup contained many different kinds of wild and cultivated seeds. Because these seeds were not readily available, it is likely that some of them were gathered deliberately for a special occasion.

2. The soup was made from seeds only available near the spring where he was found.

At first, Tollund Man was believed to be a rich man who had been ritually sacrificed, but recent analysis suggests that he may simply have been a criminal who was hanged and buried in the peat bog.

The body is currently kept in the Silkeborg Museum in Denmark.

II

Tollund Man’ is the best example of Heaney’s approach in his poetry. It was perhaps his first attempt at conflating (blending) his sense of Glob’s Jutland rituals with his own sense of mythic and modern Irish history. Heaney had read Glob’s book The Bog People’. ‘The ‘Tollund Man’ is one of the recovered bodies featured by Glob in his book. He was a victim sacrificed to Nerthus, in the hope of securing a good crop from the land, and it is in this sense that the speaker describes him, ‘Bridegroom to the goddess’. The speaker imagines the killing of the Tollund Man and his subsequent burial in the bog as a kind of violent love-making between victim and goddess, in which Nerthus, ‘opened her fen’, preserves the victim’s body by immersing it in her sexual ‘dark juices’. When the Tollund Man is dug up, many centuries later, the turf cutters discover,

His last gruel of winter seeds

Caked in his stomach.

As a sacrificial victim to the goddess of germination, he carries the potential of germination (‘gruel of winter seeds’) within himself rather than in the pockets of the young fighters in ‘Requiem for the Croppies’ whose graves sprouted with the barley from seeds in their pockets when they fell.

In the second section of the poem the connection between Jutland and Ireland is made explicit. Both places have had their innocent .victims. Ireland also has killings that have a certain ritualistic dimension to them. In the last stanza the speaker recalls an incident in which bodies of four young Catholics, murdered by Protestant militants, were dragged along a railway line in an act of mutilation:

‘Tell-tale skin and teeth

Flecking the sleepers

Of four young brothers, trailed

For miles along the lines.’

The speaker imagines that, if he addresses a prayer to the Tollund Man (‘risking blasphemy’ as a Christian by aligning himself with pagan rituals), then perhaps the potential for germination and regeneration inherent in the Tollund Man’s sacrifice, and in his very body (‘winter seeds’) might be released, not in the victim’s native Jutland, but in contemporary Ireland. It might ‘make germinate/The scattered, ambushed/ Flesh’ of the sacrificial victims.

In the final section of the poem, the speaker imagines a visit to the Museum in Aarhus where the Tollund Man has been in display. Though the names of the regions he passes through (Tollund, Grabaulle, Nebelgard’) will be alien to him, and the local language unintelligible, he fancies that, as an Irishman burdened with the weight of his country’s history, he will feel a kinship with a landscape that has witnessed similar conflict and killings.

The poem shows that the sacrificial death of the Tollund man is associated with ritual and this seems to be reflected in the dead body’s restful pose, which is a contrast to the terrible maiming and unrest of the victims in contemporary Irish society. The Tollund man’s body has been preserved and is aligned with a saint (saint’s kept body’).

The body is constantly associated with the Earth (‘peat-brown head’, ‘mild pods’) and fertility (‘His last gruel of winter seeds’). The earth is represented as female and sexual: ‘And opened her fen,/Those dark juices working’) and it is this that has preserved and elevated him to a saint.

He is seen as a bridegroom to the bride-goddess Earth, a sacrifice that will bring some good, some alleviation of pain (though of course he has been violently killed), unlike the death of the four young brothers who are killed shamefully, which resulted in only more turmoil and bloodshed.

The last lines reveal the state of mind of the speaker. The terrible paradox of both feeling lost and unhappy while ‘at home’, show the correspondences between Neolithic Jutland and modern Ireland as well as acknowledging the terror and loss that is an everyday occurrence in his world, though there is still resignation but rather a desire for peace that underlies the final lines and the whole poem.

Heaney does not venerate the Tollund Man as king or martyr, but as victim. His vowed journey to Aarhus in Jutland recalls the Catholic custom, of pilgrimage to a saint’s shrine, sometimes featuring the miraculously preserved body of the saint. Heaney’s ‘saint’ has had a brief period of glory, but has been violently killed ‘for the land’. To the poet, he stands for the Irish people killed for their allegiance to Ireland, a suggestion which is symbolically rendered as the embrace of the earth-goddess. The gold ‘tore’ (collar), worn by Celtic royalty, is likened to the arms of the goddess encircling the bridegroom’s neck, but the metaphor reminds us that this embrace is a strangulation, the noose of the victim bridegroom.

Structure

The poem is divided into eleven stanzas, and three parts. The first part has five stanzas, and the second and third three. The first part of the poem is a description of what Heaney will see when he views the body. The second part is the relationship between the religious sacrifice and the dead Irish, and the third Heaney in the country of Denmark. There is little rhyme (although Heaney uses end of line assonance occasionally), but there is a singsong rhythm in the up and down of the vowel sounds, despite Heaney's use of enjambment.

Summary 2

            The Tollund Man is a poem that promises a pilgrimage: "Some day I will go to Aarhus". In the first few stanzas the tone is expectant, determined, yet at the same time the future tense is an indication of the remoteness of the poem from the time it speaks of. While the poem never wanders in conviction, there is an element of foreignness and distance, which is reinforced by the place names ‘Aarhus’, and later ‘Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard’.

            The Tollund Man is unnamed. The pilgrim will go "to see his peat brown head"; he goes to worship, in a way, yet the tone remains impersonal. The Tollund Man is passive, his eye-lids "mild pods". A victim, the action of the poem relates not who he is but what is done to him, and in the end he "reposes" in "sad freedom". The Tollund Man, like the girl in Punishment, is portrayed as a scapegoat for society’s crimes and ignorance.

            The Tollund Man’s own journey begins when "they dug him out", destroyed and elevated at the same time. The meticulous observations of the narrator are again, detached, "his last gruel of winter seeds/caked in his stomach" yet also emphatic, emphasizing vulnerability "naked except for/the cap, noose and girdle" the remains of a ritual death.
The pilgrim makes a respectful promise to "stand a long time", but the action itself is passive, promising not to move.

            The last line of this stanza "bridegroom to the goddess" takes on a more ominous, forceful tone as the bog itself is personified and equated to Ireland, female and overwhelming "she tightened her torc on him". The language indicates the powerlessness of the victim in the face of greater, unfathomable powers, but at the same time metaphorically insists on his quasi-divinity, worked "to a saint’s kept body", bringing in religion and relating it to violence and ritual death. The Tollund Man becomes almost, a surrogate Christ. He is left to chance, "trove of the turf cutters" and finally resurrected until at last "his stained face/Reposes…"

            The poet links religion with the ordering of violence or sacrifice in order to bring peace again in comparing "the old man killing parishes of Jutland" with his own land.

            The second part of the poem suddenly becomes more emphatic after the stillness of the previous line "reposes at Aarhus" as the narrator says "I could risk blasphemy". Again here, religion is directly connected to violence but this time the pilgrim says he could "consecrate the cauldron bog/our holy ground". Religion derives it’s power from the land, as the land demands sacrifice, a 'bridegroom’, to whom the pilgrim will "pray/him to make germinate". Deriving his power from the land which turned him to a saint, the Tollund Man as victim, is linked to the "four young brothers", to whom he is both kin and saint, to "flesh of labourers" and "stockinged corpses". His paradoxical survival and repose should, the poem implies, give him the power to raise others. At this point, the language is both bleak and harsh, and can be interpreted as an impotent longing to obliterate the wrongs of the past, attempting to see this resurrection as redemption from violence, but seeing only the similarities of a ‘ritual’ of death, uncontrolled and meaningless.

            The last part of the poem returns to the quiet beginning, but here, instead of determination and looking forward, there is sorrow and despair, a sense of isolation which is linked to language. The pilgrim insists that the ‘sad freedom’ of the Tollund Man "should come to me…/saying the names" yet showing that ultimately exile means "watching the pointing hands/ of country people/not knowing their tongues" as language is defined as the root of culture, of nationality. Along with religion, and a sense of history and myth, language is central to Heaney’s poetry, and here the idea of isolation is brought sharply to the reader through the idea of being ‘lost’ in a foreign land, yet ultimately the paradoxical nature of exile is realized, the poet realizes that he feels at home in a state of homelessness, and welcomes the feeling of being lost, of not belonging to society, a sort of ‘sad freedom’ he shares with the Tollund Man, no longer tied to religious forces. The poem ends in a statement which describes both the isolation and empowering sense of exile: "I will feel lost/unhappy and at home".